


One Step Out of Time

by fellowshipper



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Canonical Character Death, Gen, Ghost Loki?, Ghosts, LITERALLY, Maybe Loki too while you're at it, Someone please give Thor a hug, Soul stuff, Spirits, Thor (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Yeah sure. Ghost Loki., kind of, no beta - we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24621565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellowshipper/pseuds/fellowshipper
Summary: Despite how much Thor's relationship with Loki has soured over the years, he's still a protective older brother.Not even death can change that.(Or, what if Thor had been allowed to grieve at least one person in his family?)
Relationships: Loki & Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 90





	One Step Out of Time

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know, I've got like 1,386 other WIPs I need to continue, but this one wouldn't leave me alone. I'm sorry. 
> 
> The title was inspired by [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0qJnwCzd94) lovely piece. I may or may not have listened to this and the Dark World soundtrack on repeat while writing this one. I'm not confirming or denying anything.
> 
> There's also an alternate version of this story that might get written later. Let's just say it involves some unintentional sorcery and a _very_ annoyed undead Loki.

Loki’s eyes are more blue than green.

The Statesman is exploding around them. No one aboard the ship has been spared, including Thor’s best friend. The acrid scent of smoke combines with the copper taste-smell of blood soaking the floor to create a noxious mixture that sticks in his nostrils and coats the back of his throat. His entire planet has been destroyed, and now an insane creature who would play god with the universe has just left with another impossibly powerful tool in his arsenal to reshape the cosmos as he sees fit.

And yet all Thor can really keep at the front of his mind, the only thought occupying him, is that even after more than a millennium of near-constant interaction, he’s never noticed that Loki’s eyes are not the brilliant emerald green he’s always believed them to be, but a lighter blue with green flecks.

He knows this now because those eyes are frozen open, unblinking; his brother, the simultaneous pain in his side and light of his world, the single person in this and every other realm he has fought against and alongside and loved in equal measure, is dead.

“Loki,” he chokes out around the blood and smoke and dust and grief thick in his mouth. The arm draped around Loki’s shoulders trembles, and Thor lies to himself, deliberately moves it to try to shake his brother’s lifeless body into some semblance of motion. “Loki, we must—we must go. We need to go. You need to wake—Loki, please.”

Eyes the color of seafoam along Vanaheim’s ageless shores stare back at him but do not see. They do not blink.

When the explosions begin, Thor does what has always come so naturally to him: he shields his younger brother with his own body and does whatever he can to keep him safe from the threat.

The last thing Thor thinks of before the darkness settles in is a memory of Loki clinging to him when they were boys, when he trembled with fear after a nightmare and tried to hide his pitiful sniffling by burying his face against Thor’s neck, swearing by all the Nine that he wasn’t doing exactly that.

*******

It takes only seconds after Thor comes back to awareness to begin questioning where Loki is.

The crew of humanoid misfits around him—and the rabbit—stare at him and then at one another, clearly confused not just by his seemingly miraculous recovery, but by the question itself. They scatter when he slides off the table, still somewhat unsteady on his feet, and begins scouring the ship, pulling back curtains and opening doors to gain answers his unlikely rescuers don’t seem inclined to give.

“Who’s Loki?” the man asks (and Thor has dealt with enough humans by now to know this one is, in fact, one of Midgard’s).

“My brother.” Thor doesn’t pause to even look at the human as he pushes open another thin door. There, a figure in even starker relief for the darkness surrounding it is stretched out upon a table identical to the one Thor himself had just left.

And even in the darkness, even in what dim light drifts through the open doorway to cast across the figure, Thor can make out achingly familiar (and yet, it seems, entirely _unfamiliar_ ) eyes open and fixed on a point a few feet to his side.

They’re still blue.

“That’s . . . oh,” the human interrupts himself, but Thor would have only ignored whatever he had to say regardless as he presses forward into the tiny room. Harsh white lights flick on as soon as he steps inside, and given his first look at Loki now under the unforgiving brightness instead of the helpful shadows on the Statesman, he gasps.

Loki has always been pale, even abnormally so. Every scratch or bruise has always shown up in vivid detail unless Loki’s vanity won out and he disguised the mark with his sorcery until it healed. But this—Thor has never seen _this_ , has never seen Loki look so ashen but for Svartalfheim. The color has drained from him, leaving behind only ugly, mottled bruising around his neck. The thin lines of dried blood around his mouth and eyes are all the more apparent against his alabaster skin—and now, for the first time, Thor can see not only the true color of Loki’s eyes, but that the whites are shot through with crimson, yet more blood sacrificed to Thanos’s hunger for power and death.

“You were holding him when you crashed onto the ship,” the green woman explains when she draws near. Her voice is low but steady; she is no stranger to death, it seems, but _grief_ is still new to her. “We tried to revive him, but he was . . . he’s been dead for hours, most likely.”

Thor’s mouth, left hanging open by the startling truth of Loki’s appearance, snaps shut for a moment, just long enough for him to clench his jaw before speaking again. “He isn’t dead.”

“Yeah, no. I know you probably don’t wanna hear that, but he’s stiff as a board,” the rabbit chimes in, and Thor’s jaw clenches a second time.

“None of you know my brother. He’s died before, and yet death has never fully claimed him.”

“Come on,” the green woman says, shooing the spectators back out into the hall. She pauses in the doorway to glance back at Thor, which he only barely notices from his peripheral vision. “If what you said about Thanos is true, we’ll need to get moving. But you should . . . we’ll give you a few minutes to say goodbye.”

She tells the computer to lower the lights and closes the door behind her, and Thor has never felt more broken as when he hears the soft click of the latch catching.

As the lights lower around him and as the sharpness of Loki’s prone form softens accordingly, Thor takes a cautious step forward, then another, forcing himself to keep going until he stands next to the table to press trembling fingers against the back of Loki’s hand. The skin is shockingly cold, and he nearly pulls away— _nearly_.

“This has gone on long enough,” he says, startled by the shakiness of his own voice. He swallows hard and tries again, fingers curling around the unresponsive hand beneath them. “Are you hiding from him? He’s gone. Or are you—you’ve always been preoccupied with whether I’ve grieved for you after the times I’ve believed you to be dead. Is this what you wanted? You wanted to see for yourself? Well, you have. You’ve seen me mourn you. You can come back now.”

Loki does not stir, and Thor feels the lump in his stomach take root and grow, hardening into a solid mass spreading up through his chest and chilling him the way not even the cold of Jotunheim ever could.

It’s nearly as cold as Loki’s hand.

“Do you want me to congratulate you on your latest trick? Congratulations. You got me. You fooled me and everyone else. It’s a fine trick you’ve pulled this time, maybe even your best. It’s very—” Thor’s voice cracks enough to make him flinch. “It’s very convincing, but it’s time to stop this nonsense.”

Loki doesn’t blink, doesn’t twitch, and Thor’s own heart begins to race in panic as he notices— _truly_ notices—that Loki’s chest isn’t moving, either.

“Loki?”

When they were children, Loki nearly succumbed to a mysterious illness, one Thor has since learned is typically only found among the Jotnar and which few in Asgard know how to treat. But Thor had been too young and optimistic to fully understand what was happening, and so he had not cried.

When Loki fell from the Bifrost, Thor was shocked into denial and refused to believe that his clever little brother, the one far cleverer than even the finest tutors who had instructed them when they were boys, was gone forever, and so he had not cried.

Even when Loki had apparently died in his arms, felled by Kurse’s poisoned blade, even when he had gone gray and limp, Thor had not let himself believe. He had been thrust into a battle with Malekith with the entire universe at stake, and so he had not cried.

And now . . .

He palms the side of Loki’s face, thumb brushing under one bloodshot eye that doesn’t track the motion, doesn’t even seem to notice, and finally, _finally_ , he cries.

He closes Loki’s mouth, and he cries.

He slides a hand over those not-green eyes (how had he never allowed himself to notice?) and gently closes them, and he cries.

He drops to his knees, forehead against the edge of the table, one hand wrapped so tightly around Loki’s wrist he hears the metallic crunch of the armor giving way, and with great, heaving sobs and wails of anguish, the Mighty Thor, Asgard’s finest hero—Asgard’s _last_ hero—mourns. Mourns his mother, who once would have dried his tears and held him until the trembling stopped. Mourns his father, who had shaped him by both his wisdom and his sternness. Mourns his friends, all of them taken long before their natural time. Mourns the sister he never knew and who was a victim of circumstance in some respect. Mourns his people, who had trusted him with their lives practically since he was born, and who he was powerless to save.

But now, for what he realizes is really the first proper time, he mourns his brother. Mourns the loss of the funny jokes and the petty remarks, the genuine smiles and the wicked sneers, the hugs and the punches. He mourns the small, quiet boy he’d teased (sometimes more than was reasonable) and the proud (if also sometimes more than was reasonable) man that boy had become, the fascinating displays of magic as Loki warped the universe around him to make it do whatever he pleased, the dazzling grace of his dance-like movements as he wielded his daggers and the savage efficiency with which he fought at other times.

He mourns green eyes that had really been blue all along, even if Thor had never really bothered to look.

*******

“I’m sorry. You want us to _what_?”

Thor stands, unmoved and unmovable, unflinching against the disbelieving faces all turned toward him.

“I need you to land on a planet. Preferably one with water, perhaps an ocean or a large river, but any terrestrial planet will do.”

“No, we got that,” the human (Quill, Thor remembers hearing him called, not that he particularly cares) says while dipping his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. “But why?”

Thor’s back straightens and his shoulders tip back, pulling him up to his full height and, he hopes, all the regal haughtiness a prince of Asgard—no, a _king_ of Asgard—can muster. “I would give my brother a proper funeral. He died . . .” He trails off, gaze slipping lower as he says aloud for the first time what he’s been avoiding even thinking for hours. “He died trying to save me. He was—” And _oh_ , how that word burns at Thor’s mind and tears at it until he realizes the others are staring at him expectantly. “He was a prince of Asgard. An Odinson, and a prince of his own realm that he should have ruled by rights as its king. And as king of Asgard, it is my duty and _privilege_ to see that he rests with dignity.”

“You ain’t king of nothin’ anymore. Asgard got blown to smithereens, remember?” the rabbit asks without so much as flinching, prompting Thor to cast a withering glare in his direction before looking back at Quill.

“As long as my heart still beats in my chest and air still fills my lungs, Asgard will also live. And as its king, I am ordering—”

“This isn’t Asgard!” Quill shouts, arms thrown out to the sides before crossing over his chest. “This is _my_ ship, and we’ve got more important things to do right now than to hold a freakin’ funeral.”

There is no true atmosphere aboard the ship, only a facsimile which enables them to breathe, but Thor still calls the lightning to his side and feels it spark in his veins, hears the sizzle of it in the air, and revels in how it makes Quill shrink back a step before he steels his spine.

“Then I will take your pod and go on my own, and I will not show such patience with anyone who tries to stop me.”

“We could put him out the airlock,” the shirtless warrior adds, offering only a shrug when several pairs of eyes land on him. “I mean the dead one. But maybe the new one too.”

“My brother deserves more than to be tossed into the abyss of space, and I would sooner throw out everyone on this ship while they’re still alive than do that to his body.”

“Wow. Not cool,” Quill mutters, but when Thor advances on him again, he holds up his hands, palms out. “Okay, look. Losing family sucks. Believe me, I know. But if we do this, we land, hold the funeral, and get the hell out and get back to the objectively more important business of saving the rest of the universe. Got it?”

The human’s audacity is galling, but after several tense seconds, Thor nods just once, tersely.

The universe can wait on him to bury his world.

*******

Frigga’s favorite handmaiden was a young woman named Amyria. She features in many of Thor’s earliest memories, as she was something of an older sister to the two princelings often left in her care. She listened with honest interest to all of Thor’s fanciful stories about this or that imaginary creature he had slain with a wooden sword in the courtyard, and she clapped and giggled in response to Loki’s attempts at impressing her with his fledgling magic displays.

Even after she reached adulthood and wed one of the Einherjar, she refused to leave her queen’s side, opting instead for the practically unheard-of position of a married woman of some middling status who continued her service as handmaiden. Thor had never been surprised by this, really, given how Frigga always doted on her like one of her own children.

When Amyria was widowed following her husband’s death in a meaningless skirmish in some backwater realm, Frigga held her and let her sob against her shoulder.

When Amyria discovered soon afterward that she was carrying her deceased husband’s child, Frigga immediately began arrangements for the addition of a private nursery in Amyria’s quarters, complete with lavish decorations, exotic furs and silks, and beautiful tapestries she wove herself.

And when Amyria died in childbirth, Frigga worked through her grief by entrusting the infant to one of the older handmaidens and immediately beginning the funeral preparations herself.

It was “beneath” a queen’s duties to perform such work; even as young as Thor had been at the time, he had understood that this was work to be delegated to others. Yet his mother had insisted on doing it all herself as one last display of gratitude toward a girl she had practically raised as a daughter.

So Thor had hovered by Frigga’s side during the long nights of preparation. He watched as Frigga patiently combed out Amyria’s long, dark hair and then arranged it into immaculate plaits held in place with delicate pins. He watched as Frigga cleaned Amyria’s body, and he felt no small amount of amazement to see the queen of Asgard taking such pains to wash a dead servant’s feet and hands. Frigga dressed Amyria in the finest materials from the most far-flung realms along Yggdrasil’s branches, and bedecked her in ornate jewels that hung from her wrists, neck, ears, hair, midriff, and ankles.

At the funeral itself, Frigga refused anyone else’s help and insisted upon placing Amyria’s few meager belongings around her on the pyre, along with some priceless relics of her own to accompany the young woman on her journey into whatever existed beyond death.

Even when the pyre was lit and the smoke billowed up into the air, as Thor and Loki both attempted to hide their tears for their beloved friend, Frigga had stood tall and proud and regal as ever, determined as she was to show her surrogate daughter the respect she was due.

That night, though, long after the palace had gone dark and quiet and most had gone to sleep, Thor wandered into his mother’s weaving room and found her sobbing on the ground, clutching one of Amyria’s dresses to her chest, at least until she noticed her young son and pulled him to her instead.

It was Thor’s first—though sadly, not his last—encounter with death, and yet it’s only now as he looks down at Loki, splayed out over the table, that he recognizes Frigga’s devotion to Amyria as not just born from respect, but from love. The bucket at his feet is full of rust-colored water; Loki had sustained many more injuries than Thor had suspected once the layers of leather and armor had been peeled away. For lack of any acceptable rags, Thor had torn his own cape to strips and soaked them to help cleanse his brother’s body. It is only after the fact that he thinks to be grateful that the fabric itself is red as well.

The leather is ill-fitting and cheap, plain, not at all the filigreed designs Loki has always favored and commissioned from the finest leatherworkers in Vanaheim. The armor is likewise thin and makeshift, not tailored to Loki’s precise measurements and personal tastes like the smiths of Asgard trusted to armor the royal family had made. The whole ensemble is torn in places, scorched, or sticky with still-drying blood—though whether it’s Loki’s own or one of the reanimated Einherjar from the Bifrost engagement is impossible to tell.

It felt wrong to take such pains clearing the blood from Loki’s skin only to cover it with substandard armor that was never truly his in the first place, and so Thor had grabbed a simple, white bed sheet from an unused cot nearby and wrapped it around Loki’s too-still form, ends rolled gently under his shoulders as if Thor were only tucking him in like when they were children.

The ship touched down an hour earlier on a planet that reminds Thor of Alfheim with its impressive, snow-capped mountains surrounded by thick forests full of massive, towering hardwoods. It’s the sort of place he thinks Loki would have liked, an ancient place full of secrets to discover and the unmistakable taste of magic on the air which was just as omnipresent as it had been on Asgard, where the source of Loki’s abilities had been strongest.

At Thor’s request (and insistence), the shirtless warrior and the rabbit had disembarked to begin felling trees from which to fashion a pyre. Quill and the green woman had remained aboard to “keep an eye on him,” as Quill had put it, but they have so far kept out of Thor’s way. The strange woman with the antennae came into the room where Loki lay, just once, and asked Thor if she could help. She had taken one look at him, frowned, and then apologized for interrupting and left. Thor was glad to see her go.

And now, Thor is left to the unenviable task of preparing his brother’s corpse for his funeral—a funeral with only one who will mourn him, on an entirely foreign planet where he will likely never be visited again. Where Thor will leave him, _again_.

Thor looks down at the fall of black hair fanning out beneath Loki’s head, stark in its contrast against the white slab beneath him. For what must be the hundredth time by his count, he runs the comb he found in a drawer across the room through the dark locks, gently tugging through the matted curls at the ends and being careful not to tear the strands loose from the scalp. Loki was always so fussy about his hair, a laughably innocent conceit for one so consumed by pride and self-loathing alike. He had always claimed otherwise, but Thor knew it stung him when Sif likened him to a maradrill, an especially hated rodent among Asgardian farmers, with its long snout and oily black hair. Thor still suspects that to be the motivation behind Loki stealing into Sif’s quarters one night and shearing her hair down to a brutal crop, and then ensuring that what grew back was as black as one of the All-Father’s ravens—as black as Loki’s own hair.

Thor continues combing, even long after the gnarls are brushed out, though the hair is still as wavy as ever and now made slightly frizzy with the curls loosened. For the second time in his life, Thor uses one of Loki’s daggers to cut a long lock at the roots, and without thinking, he begins to braid it into his own hair. He will not leave everything of his brother here on this distant realm to be buried by the snow and forgotten to the stars, remembered only by the ancient trees standing guard over his smoldering remains.

“Hey, Blondie,” he hears behind him, and he glances over his shoulder to see Quill standing in the doorway looking appropriately regretful. “Rocket just called in. The, uh . . . pyre, you called it? It’s ready.”

Thor turns back to let his gaze fall on Loki again, on the gentle sweep of his lashes across the top of those always-too-prominent cheeks, on the wicked bruising around his throat that no amount of cleansing can erase.

“Are you?”

He does not answer, and after a few seconds, he hears Quill shuffle his feet.

“I don’t mean to be insensitive or anything here, but we really do need to get moving.”

Thor finishes the braid and then tucks Loki’s dagger into his belt. Carefully, as though Loki is only sleeping and Thor is afraid of waking him, he tucks one arm under Loki’s knees and the other under his shoulders, then lifts him from the table and turns to face Quill.

“Take us there.”

*******

“There,” as it turns out, is a few hundred yards from the clearing in which the ship landed, a quiet spot that appears not to have been touched by any signs of civilization in an age, if ever. An elk-like creature, though far more massive, watches the proceedings from the edge of the tree line to the group’s right, its tail flicking periodically as it seems to try to work out what these strange new creatures are and if they mean it harm. Eventually, it turns and bounds off into the woods, graceful and silent, and presumably unaware of the shirtless warrior’s laments that it would have made a fine meal.

Snow drops from the sagging tree branches hanging along the perimeter of the clearing, landing in muted thumps now and then. Great owls, larger than any Thor has seen, hoot deep in the forest, their calls echoing and multiplying the sound until it seems as though there are dozens of the beasts gathered to act as witnesses. One flies closer to land on a fallen log, wings folding back into place, eyes wide and unblinking.

They remind Thor too much of Loki’s when on the Statesman, and he looks away.

There is magic on this realm. He can feel it heavy in the air, like oppressive humidity accompanying clouds heavy with moisture. He can feel it, true, but he cannot channel it; regardless of what Odin had told him regarding his power, there is still a vast difference between channeling Mjolnir’s energy and what Frigga and especially Loki could do. Frigga, raised by witches, had taught her tricks to her more intellectually curious son, who had then grown up to expand on those teachings until he could lie to the universe so much it began to believe him and respond as if his reality were the true one.

Thor doesn’t understand why Loki would have chosen to abandon his greatest power when he needed it most in favor of a blade against the strongest foe he had ever faced. He won’t ever know, and that truth gnaws at Thor, just one more of Loki’s many secrets to be burned with him.

His steps slow as he draws nearer to the pyre, Loki’s weight in his arms going from what had felt like nothing to a suddenly unbearable load. He falters, the shin-deep snow clinging to him like mud and dragging him to a halt where before he had barely noticed its presence. His breath quickens, chest aching with the cold, with exertion, with the grief of a heart breaking all over again.

He stumbles forward, and it’s only the—admittedly humorous—thought of Loki haunting him in the afterlife for dropping his body that keeps Thor upright.

“Do you need me to—”

“No,” Thor all but barks, not even sparing a glance at Quill, though he follows up with a quieter, “No. This is my duty.”

Calling upon the strength of his ancestors, including those he has only recently lost, Thor reaches the pyre with Loki still safely cradled in his arms, still looking for all the Nine like he’s merely being put to bed. If not for the bruises—

Thor kicks out some of the base of the pyre to create a foothold so that he can boost himself high enough to reach the top, which rests a full head above him. Slowly, gently, he lowers Loki’s body onto the bed of sticks and twigs left flat at the top to form a kind of bed; someone, it appears, found yellow, bell-shaped flowers, still wet with melted snow, and scattered them around the edges. Despite himself, Thor feels the faintest of smiles tugging at his mouth.

“Rabbit,” he calls, glancing around for the creature. His eyes sweep over the crew, landing not on who he seeks but on the odd insect-like woman instead. Her head is bowed as if in thought—or prayer—and her thin hands clutch one of the yellow flowers to her chest. Thor’s mouth goes dry.

“First, it’s Rocket,” comes a voice, drawing Thor’s attention down and to his left. The rabbit stands there looking up at him, unimpressed, or at least as unimpressed as a rabbit possibly can, a canister nearly as large as itself held in its paws. “Second . . . we don’t really use oil, but I found something we don’t need that’ll burn just as good.”

Thor accepts the canister with a nod by way of thanks. It’s lighter than he expected, and it rattles with how badly he’s shaking before he sets it aside.

“Oh, Loki,” he murmurs, smoothing Loki’s hair back into some form of respectability. If it’s an excuse to stroke a hand over his brother’s forehead and cup the top of his head, he doesn’t think of it. Much. “My earliest memory is of you. You were just a tiny baby, still new to the family, and you were being very fussy. You wouldn’t stop crying, no matter what any of us did. Mother fed you, rocked you, sang to you, and nothing helped. Even her illusions didn’t amuse you as they normally did.”

Thor ducks his head, soft smile parting his lips.

“I begged Mother to let me try. She was afraid I might drop you, since I was still very young myself. I promised her I wouldn’t. So she trusted me to hold you, and do you know what you did? The moment I got you into my arms, you vomited on me. It was impressive. I had no idea an infant’s stomach could hold so much.”

He strokes his thumb across Loki’s forehead, just as he had in that memory.

“Mother began fussing over both of us then, and I might have thrown you to the ground if you hadn’t stopped crying. But you did. It was the first time I’d ever seen you smile. I have to assume it had something to do with getting sick all over me.”

Tears prick at his eyes, hot and burning, as he folds Loki’s arms over his chest, hands clasped around the dagger Thor had tucked into his belt before leaving the ship. Then, abruptly taken by the knowledge that Loki died a warrior and thus deserves a warrior’s sendoff, he removes the dagger and then lowers the sheet still wrapped around Loki’s body, dragging it down to just above his navel. With still-trembling hands and only the half-remembered lessons of his youth, he sets about with slow but precise movements, cutting shallow runes into Loki’s chest: runes for peace, runes for mercy, runes for glory to see him into the afterlife, however much he doubts Loki ever even believed in such a thing. These days, Thor isn’t so sure himself.

He ignores the uncomfortable murmuring from someone in the group below and slashes a line across his palm, gritting his teeth at the pain. With the opposite hand, he dips two fingers into the cut and smears them with blood, which he then uses to paint parallel lines down both of Loki’s cheeks, then a single one from his hairline, down his nose, over the center of his lips, down over his chin, and halfway down his neck, until the line can be spread no further.

“We may not have been brothers by birth,” he explains in a hushed rasp, voice threatening to break under the coming tide of grief, “but we will be blood brothers now. May the blood of the Odinson line see you safely into Valhalla—or wherever you should end up.” He rests his cut palm over the series of runes carved over Loki’s heart, now so eerily still and quiet. “I wish you well, brother. And I hope you’ll finally find the peace you could never find in life.”

Vision blurred with the first tears beginning to break the dam, Thor places the dagger back into Loki’s clasped hands. Then he removes the lid from the canister and tips it sideways, unable to watch as the liquid begins to soak through the sheet and darken the wood around them. He steps back down to the ground before he accidentally douses himself, walking a slow, mournful circle around the pyre and soaking the wood as thoroughly as he’s able. There isn’t nearly enough of the not-oil, but it will have to suffice.

“Here,” the rabbit says once Thor has come back to his side, offering a makeshift torch already lit, Thor assumes, by the device held in its other paw, smoke still curling off the tip of the metal barrel. Thor nods and accepts the torch, though he hesitates, throat clenching.

“We’re going back to the ship. Need to check some systems before we take off again,” Quill points out. He clears his throat and dusts some freshly fallen snow off his coat. “We’ll, uh . . . leave you to it then. Just try to hurry it up, okay?”

Thor’s only response is a nod, and he barely notices as the group shuffles past. He does, though, lock eyes with the woman with the antennae, who in turn offers him a respectful head bow before following along behind the shirtless warrior.

As their footsteps recede until even the sounds of the snow crunching under their boots can no longer be heard, Thor regards the pyre, arm outstretched but not close enough to risk the fire leaping from the torch to the wood. The flame dances in front of his eyes, searing his retinas for how intensely it burns and how he insists on staring directly into its core, but still, he does not move. To do so is to acknowledge the finality of the situation, to commit Loki’s whole existence to bones and ash, and it’s not . . . he can’t . . .

“Well, it’s hardly befitting a prince, but I suppose it will do, given the circumstances.”

Thor nearly drops the torch into the snow for how quickly he slides around on his heels, eyes flitting wildly about his surroundings in search of—it was Loki’s voice. He knows it in his heart as surely as he can feel his own breath in his lungs, now coming out in frozen puffs with each startled exhale.

There is nothing. Even his new companions have already disappeared into the ship in the distance. A small, brown bird with inquisitive, coal-black eyes stops hopping along the ground long enough to watch him, and Thor narrows his eyes at it.

“Loki?”

The bird cocks its head, shakes the snow off its back, and then returns to its business of searching for food.

Thor laughs at himself, cold and brittle, and almost regrets shredding his cloak for wash rags now that it’s no longer at the ready to cover his shoulders from the frigid air.

“I’m going mad.”

“I would argue you reached that point a long time ago, actually.”

Thor swings the torch in a semicircle around him, fire trailing through the air. “How dare you take the voice of a son of Odin to torment me, fiend! Show yourself!”

Silence for a few seconds, and then, “You . . . you can hear me?”

Thor spins again, finding himself longing for a weapon, wishing he had held onto Loki’s dagger.

“Loki? Are you—oh, gods, are you alive? Loki!” He scrambles toward the pyre, ready to risk setting himself alight to pull his brother from the center.

“No! Thor, stop!”

And just like that, Thor pulls up short, frozen in place by a voice he can’t locate. He must _truly_ be losing his mind.

“Well. I didn’t count on this. Interesting. Thor—”

“Loki, you’re alive! Hold on, I’ll get you down—”

“I’m not alive.”

Thor breathes in sharply and exhales in a rush, eyes narrowing as he continues to scan the area. “Loki, if this is another of your tricks . . .”

“Look to your right. Take three—no, four steps in that direction.” Thor, for reasons he doesn’t wish to examine, obeys the voice that might be coming from his own head, stopping short when the voice orders him to. He glances around, still seeing nothing, though he swears he can hear the voice laughing—at him, no doubt. “Incredible. The magic is so thick on this planet that even someone as hopelessly untalented at sorcery as you can sense it.”

“I don’t—”

“Open your eyes.”

“They _are_ open.”

“Yes, but you aren’t _using_ them. Thor. _Look._ Can you see me?”

Thor grits his teeth in frustration. “I don’t see anything. Whatever foul spirit is trying to hurt me further—”

“For Bor’s sake. No wonder Mother could never teach you her craft. You have the patience of a toddler.” The voice sounds irritated, and it pauses as if gathering its resolve before continuing. “Close your eyes. Concentrate. Feel the magic around you. It’s so strong here that even _you_ should be able to grasp onto it. It should be enough.”

Against his better judgment, Thor does as instructed and closes his eyes, spots dancing behind his eyelids from the light of the torch.

“Good. Now, imagine yourself as the center knot of many tangled strings. Imagine my voice as one of those strings, distinct from the others. Tell me what you see.”

Thor concentrates on the imaginary scenario, focusing on the voice until he sees a single thread unravel to stretch out into the darkness, evidently held aloft under its own power.

“There’s a string directly in front of me. It looks delicate.”

The voice goes quiet for a few seconds before continuing. “I need you to grab onto it.”

The gossamer thread, as fine as spider silk, glitters before Thor’s eyes, tempting, but he dares not touch it. “But it’s so thin. It’ll break as soon as I—”

“It won’t,” the voice says with Loki’s same infuriating smugness that always used to indicate he knew something with absolute certainty. Then, so quietly Thor can hardly hear, “It would seem our bond is stronger than either of us could have supposed.”

With a shaking inhale and a dangerous bud of hope blooming in his chest, Thor does as asked and envisions himself grasping the thread. It wavers, thin and fading, but then flares abruptly and curls around Thor’s wrist and along his arm. The ethereal light hardens into something like cord, and when it begins to pull at Thor’s arm, he has no choice but to follow it. One hand over the other, over and over again, until he reaches the end of the rope unexpectedly. His brow furrows, as he tries to piece together what’s happened and what he’s done wrong—and when he opens his eyes to ask, he sees Loki standing before him.

Well. A version of Loki, anyway.

Thor gasps and stumbles backwards, mouth dropping open as he takes in the sight of his very dead brother standing before him, hands folded neatly behind his back. He wears the same dark leather as the last time Thor had seen him alive, but without the rips and blood, without the soot from the blackened remains of the Statesman, without the ruined bracer Thor crushed earlier in his grief. His face is clean and unmarked by the horror of those final moments, and his eyes—

They are blue, yes, but crisp and alert. Mischievous, even, and Thor barely manages to choke down a sob before it crawls from his throat.

“Loki . . .?”

That smile, at once deadly and charming, sharp, white, wolf’s teeth promising vengeance for wrongs long since forgotten by the rest of the universe, and Thor shudders—in fear, perhaps, but also relief.

“In the ghostly flesh, as it were.” Loki’s chin juts up and forward just enough to give him his usual air of royal haughtiness. “I can’t see myself, of course, but I’m certain I must look better than you do right now. That’s saying quite a lot, given my current state,” he adds with a quick gesture at his own funeral pyre by his side.

Despite the sudden dryness of his mouth and the way every word he’s never spoken aloud to his brother curls in his throat and tries to claw its way out, Thor finds himself utterly silent, gaping, eyes wide. The silence, like the distance between their souls, stretches forever, burning and aching in a way Thor only ever felt previously while watching his mother’s funeral ship burst into flames.

Loki, being exactly who he is, merely shrugs and stretches his arms out to the sides to indicate the space around them. “Where have you brought me to rest? Do you even know?” He waits for an answer which doesn’t come, which _can’t_ come, and he lets out an exasperated sigh. “For the only one of us who’s still alive, you’re not being very vocal here. Or helpful, for that matter.”

“You’re alive.”

Thor winces as his voice cracks, as his legs quiver just with the weight of those two words, as his eyes fill with tears that only sting more for the cold wind blowing into his face. The chill on his skin is no match for the ice that’s settled in his gut, wound itself around his ribs and has begun seeping in to wrap around his heart. His father, his friends, his home, his people, all lost, and he’d thought his brother, but now . . .

“I’m not.” Loki’s voice is quiet, almost apologetic, and Thor shakes his head.

“I can see you. I can hear you. I can—”

“You’re seeing me as I wish you to see me, Thor,” Loki interrupts, uncharacteristically gentle. The air shimmers around him, pinpricks of golden light swirling like the snow beginning to fall around them once more. When it clears, he stands in his full ceremonial dress, the same ostentatious garb he’d last worn at Thor’s aborted coronation. The air shifts again, and Loki appears in the sharp lines and oppressive metal of the same clothing he’d worn during his failed attempt to take Midgard. The air shifts again, and now he stands in the same green and black leathers as before, but the horrid cuts and bruises have returned, as has the blood in his eyes and seeping from the corner of his mouth, the pallid skin, the black and purple rings forming a nearly complete circle around his neck.

Thor swallows hard but does not dare avert his eyes. This is one of Loki’s tests, he’s sure, and looking away will only give Loki the upper hand in a battle Thor doesn’t even want to fight.

Then Loki adds the finishing touch, changing the illusion to reveal his eerily crooked neck with the bones obviously displaced, pushed out of position by the Mad Titan’s grip, and Thor instinctively drops his gaze down and to the side.

“Enough. I’ve seen—I’ve seen enough.”

“Have you?” Loki steps forward, though he leaves no impressions in the snow. “Because I’m not sure you understand just yet, but I need you to. Look at me, Thor.” He waits a second, two, five, then takes another step forward. “Thor.”

Thor looks up, relieved to find Loki has changed his appearance yet again, this time into the same kind of casual dress he would have worn on Asgard long ago: dark breeches with a long, dark green tunic belted at the waist with a simple brown strip of leather. It isn’t nearly as ornate and elaborate as Loki often liked to present himself in public, with all the trappings of Asgardian royalty, but Thor had found him in his quarters or in the archives or in their mother’s gardens in very similar clothing.

It is an outfit of comfort, of peaceful solitude, and the intent behind it isn’t lost on Thor.

“This isn’t my world anymore. In all ways considered. It’s taking a great deal of effort to maintain any sort of presence here, even if it’s in spirit only.” Loki drops his arms and tips his head to the side, the hard lines of his mouth softening. “I’m only here to see you . . .”

Thor waits, eyebrows gradually lifting, until Loki glances over at his pyre, seeming to take in the undoubtedly disturbing sight of his own lifeless body readied for burning.

When Loki looks back at Thor, the previous softness is gone, replaced with the same sharp-edged grin. “I’m here to see that you don’t burn down the entire forest. And that you actually follow through with this.”

“I can’t—”

“I don’t really care what you can or can’t do, only what you _must_ do. I’m in no mood to spend the rest of eternity on whatever frozen wasteland this might be.” Loki takes a moment to look around, nose wrinkling. “Just because I was born on one doesn’t mean I want to have my funeral on one as well.”

“You’re asking me to burn—” The words get caught around the grief swelling his tongue, forcing Thor to blink, breathe, and try again, no matter how his voice wavers. “Loki, I can’t. I _can’t_. I can’t watch—”

“Then light the bloody fire and walk away, you idiot.” Loki snarls as he speaks, lips curled back in a way that’s far too exaggerated to be honest. But then, Thor reasons, is anything ever entirely honest with Loki? “I don’t mean to let you trap me here.”

“Trap—”

“Until my body is destroyed, my spirit is bound to wherever it rests.” A passing raven overhead cries loudly enough to force them both to look up and watch its powerful wings beat against the gray sky. When their eyes meet again, Loki’s are almost pleading—though again, Thor wonders, how much of it is earnest is impossible to say. “I know you to be many things, brother, but you have never been cruel. Yet you could do nothing worse than damning me to remain here until the universe ends.”

“You want me to let you burn.”

Loki glances down for just a moment, dark lashes stark against his pale cheeks, before looking back up. “I want you to let me go.”

The growing tightness in Thor’s chest crushes inward, sharp and unrelenting, and it’s only pure stubbornness that locks his legs and keeps him upright. Loki watches him, expectant, until Thor turns a small grin back at him.

“When we were children, I made Mother a promise that I would always look out for you, that I would protect you. I promised you that same night when you were frightened by a nightmare.” His gaze drifts to the pyre, grin fading. “I failed her, and I’ve failed you. Over and over. I was never a good brother to you, or a good friend. I let you fall—”

“I let go.”

“I left you in the Chitauri’s grip and let them poison your mind. I let Father keep you even from attending Mother’s funeral. I let Kurse kill you, or at least I thought I did. I let Thanos—” His words cut short on the jagged edge of a barely contained sob that forces him to look away before Loki can spot his watery eyes and inevitably mock him for the same. “I’ve failed you. I’ve never done anything but fail you.”

The raven alights on an exposed part of the pyre and watches them silently, sharp eyes keen and curious.

“I’m sorry, brother. For everything.”

The faint twitch at one corner of Loki’s mouth is the only indication he gives of being affected, and it’s gone as soon as Thor notices, replaced instead with a crooked smirk. “Mother always said I could show up at a god’s funeral and somehow make it all about me. She had that right, I suppose, but with the wrong son.”

Despite himself, Thor barks out a short laugh, and it only continues when he sees the smirk broaden into the first genuine smile he can recall seeing from Loki in an age.

“Since this will be our last meeting, at least for a while,” Loki begins once Thor goes quiet again, “I suppose I might as well give you this: you haven’t failed me. Disappointed me at times, yes. Angered me, gods, yes, many times. But you haven’t failed me.”

“I haven’t protected you either.”

Loki sighs, some of that familiar exasperation creeping back into his tone. “That was never your job. I never wanted you to be my keeper. I cheated my way out of fate more than once and chose my own. That’s more than most get.” The raven caws and gets Loki to watch it for a moment, and then Thor’s breath sticks in his throat when Loki looks back at him, eyes bright. “I trust you won’t fail me again. I only need you to do one last thing for me.”

“Loki . . .”

If Loki hears him, he shows no sign of it. Instead, he lifts his hand, palm facing outward, long, slender fingers cutting through the increasingly powerful snowstorm that’s erupted around them. Without knowing exactly why, Thor raises his hand as well and holds it just centimeters from his brother’s, realizing instinctively that if he tries to touch it, he’ll meet only air; that knowledge alone might break him, he fears.

“Let me go, brother.”

“I don’t know _how_.”

“You know.” Loki glances once more at the pyre, and when Thor follows his line of sight, he notices the raven has left without so much as its footprints remaining to mark its presence. After what seems to him the span of several lifetimes, Thor nods and lowers his head, ashamed of the tears that burn his chilled skin as they finally begin to slide along his cheeks.

As he looks up, he sees that Loki—his soul, his apparition, whatever it may be—has moved to the opposite side of the pyre and has once again changed, this time back into his ceremonial wear but complete with his cape and helmet. In his hands he holds the same broadsword their mother had carried with her into the stars, his hands wrapped around the hilt with familiarity. He looks, Thor thinks, every bit a prince of Asgard, every bit a son of Odin—every bit a king, even if only in spirit.

Moving under a power he can’t entirely swear is his own, Thor draws closer to the pyre, holding the torch perilously close. His eyes lock onto Loki’s, and when he’s met with the slightest nod, at long last, he touches the flame to the soaked wood and watches as flames almost instantly engulf the structure. They dance along the frame, wood popping and crackling under the heat, and as they draw nearer to the center—nearer to Loki’s body—Thor peers through the smoke and haze to see his brother’s spirit, as best he can tell, wavy in the heat of the fire but there still.

And once the smoke clears from Thor’s vision long enough for him to see anything but the haze, he sees that Loki’s head is bent low, and he holds one arm across his chest in the traditional Asgardian salute meant for the ruling monarch.

“Thank you, brother,” Loki says, voice barely audible above the popping wood but still somehow crystal clear, as though the words are being spoken directly into Thor’s mind. The younger prince looks up, a soft smile making him appear much younger than his hard later years have made him, and Thor sees the boy he had loved so deeply staring back at him. “My king.”

The fire spreads quickly, reaching the edges of Loki’s cloak spread out beneath him. Thor chokes and looks across the pyre just in time to catch sight of his last remaining family member, his last true connection to his home, dissolve into countless orbs of swirling gold light.

The last Thor sees of his brother is a smile—honest, at last, and at peace.

He watches, frozen at his core despite the raging fire, as the flames consume their feast, as everything burns but the memories and the righteous fury drowning his veins.

The raven returns to land near the growing pile of ashes, this time accompanied by a smaller black bird whose wings shimmer green in the dwindling firelight, and Thor notices the striking blue eyes that seem far too intelligent.

_Trust my rage_ , Loki had told him after their mother’s death. It will become a mantra, Thor thinks, as he turns to begin the determined walk back to the Guardians’ ship, a curse and a promise, the last one to keep to his family, inscribed on his heart and inked with Thanos’s blood.


End file.
